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In Times of Peace	By : SouthSideStory Category: Naruto > Het - Male/Female > Sasuke/Sakura Views: 3794 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto, nor the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 3
- 4
Chapter Four
“Give me a mission,” Sasuke says.
Naruto ruffles the back of his hair and holds out a scroll. “Here. This is a B-rank escort--”
“Don’t insult me, dobe.”
“Show a little respect to your Hokage, asshole! And I can’t give you every S-rank mission that comes through this office.”
“No, but you can give me one today.” Sasuke wants to get out of Konoha, soon.
Naruto grumbles something about ungrateful subordinates and digs through the scrolls on his desk. “Take this. It’s an infiltration and assassination.”
Sasuke skims over the mission directive. He’ll need to pose as a mercenary and offer his services to the missing-nin Fujimoto Gorou, leader of a ring of criminals straight out of the Bingo Book. Intel collected by Konoha indicates that he has an outpost not far from Kusa. Once inside, he is to gather information on Fujimoto’s confederates, then eliminate him.
A mission like that will take days, possibly weeks.
Perfect. “This will do,” Sasuke says.
Naruto snorts. “Well I’m glad assassination is all it takes to make you happy. Wanna get some ramen? I’m almost done here.”
“Don’t you want to go home to your wife?”
“Hinata took Kushina to see Hanabi and Hiashi,” says Naruto.
“Fine, then.”
Sasuke knows it’s futile to suggest something different for dinner. He waits for Naruto to finish his correspondence, and then they go to Ichiraku. The sun has already set on the village, and the warm light of the restaurant is a welcoming beacon in the dusk.
“Oy!” Naruto yells. “Sakura-chan!”
Sasuke turns to see their teammate. She’s wearing her medic clothes, hair pulled up in a short ponytail, walking from the direction of the hospital, so he assumes she just finished her shift at work.
“Hey, Naruto,” she calls. Then, “Sasuke.”
Because he was taught never to shout across a public area in such a way, Sasuke nods a hello.
Naruto waves in a manner somewhat undignified for the Hokage. “Come get dinner with us!”
She hesitates, glancing between the two men who have bookended her life. Naruto, so eager, and Sasuke, who’s trying to look as indifferent as he doesn’t feel. He must succeed, because when Sakura comes closer it’s only to say, “Next time.”
Naruto is never so easily brushed off. “No, this time,” he says, and takes her by the arm.
“Naruto!” she says, in the voice she usually adopts before clocking someone. But she lets him half-drag her into Ichiraku all the same. Sakura scrambles to sit beside Naruto instead of him. She’s so obvious about it that Sasuke has the petty urge to change seats. Instead, he picks up a menu that he doesn’t need and looks over the list of items that he’s memorized over the last six years. “Tonkotsu,” he says, and a few minutes later Teuchi sits a large bowl of pork broth and noodles before him.
Tonight Sakura orders Shoyu without the chili oil (predictable, she hates spicy food) and Naruto asks for three different kinds of ramen.
“My best customer,” Teuchi says proudly.
They eat without talking until Naruto has finished his second bowl. Then he says, “So, Sasuke, when are you gonna leave?”
“Leave?” Sakura looks up, a noodle dangling from between her lips. She blushes and covers her mouth.
“Yeah. I just gave him a mission to go after some old S-rank criminal hiding out near Kusa.”
Sasuke sighs. “Say that a little louder, Naruto. I don’t think the people on the street heard you.”
“S-rank?” Sakura asks. “He must be tough.”
Naruto nods and goes on blithely. “It’s Fujimoto Gorou. Apparently he and his men gave the Sannin a hard time in Ame at some point.”
“I know who he is,” she says. “Tsunade-shishou told me all about him.” Sakura looks at Sasuke and asks, voice careful, “Did Orochimaru ever--”
“No,” he says.
“I’m sure you’re more than capable of facing Fujimoto,” says Sakura. “But you shouldn’t take him lightly.”
“What makes you think I would?”
She’s quiet for a long moment, maybe weighing the worth of what she wants to say. “Because you’re arrogant and you never think anyone’s a threat until they half-kill you.”
The accusation doesn’t sting--perhaps because he’s as conceited as she suggests--but it does surprise him. Sakura has loved him and held him and tried to poison him, but she has never once insulted him that Sasuke can recall.
Naruto laughs and says, “She’s got you there.”
“Hn.” He finishes his ramen and pays. “I’m heading home.”
“Already?” Naruto asks.
“Better get a good night’s sleep if I want to be prepared to face such a dangerous criminal.” Sarcasm is lost on the dobe, but Sakura is much smarter and she frowns.
He expects her to say something. A final warning to take Fujimoto seriously or a simple farewell. Sasuke does not expect her to slap her own ryo on the counter and follow him out of Ichiraku, but that’s what Sakura does. She walks with him for one block, two, three. Silent. They pass the avenue that leads to her apartment, and still she stays beside him, saying nothing. Sasuke’s patience runs thin as they near his own building, and he asks, “What do you want?”
Sakura stops in the middle of the road. He keeps walking until there are a few yards between them. Sasuke considers going on, leaving her stranded here on this deserted street, but he can’t do it. He turns to face her.
“I’m still in love with you,” Sakura says. Easily, plainly, as if what she’s talking about is no more important than the weather. “I know you don’t feel the same, so don’t worry about me trying to pursue you.”
There is a stone bench nearby, and no, it does not escape him, how almost-funny it is when Sakura chooses to sit there. Except that there is nothing funny about this. She pulls the rubber band from her hair and runs her fingers through the choppy, pink locks. It is a bad time, he thinks, to notice that although he usually prefers long hair on women, he likes Sakura’s short.
“The last time I said this it was because I thought it might convince you to stay with me,” she says. “But I’m not that little girl anymore, and I know not to expect anything from you.”
“Why are you telling me?” he asks
“Because I have to. Because it’s been eleven years--half my life, Sasuke--and I’m tired of carrying it around like a secret. I’ve done everything else I can think of to get rid of this feeling. I’ve tried to bury it in training, and I’ve tried giving myself to other men, but it doesn’t work. Nothing works. So maybe if I say it out loud, if I tell you, maybe then it will finally go away.”
Sasuke can’t think what to say. She keeps surprising him, this woman he thought he had figured out. He’d assumed that her love for him died when she tried to stab him in the back, but apparently he was wrong. And what a stupid presumption to make, really, because shouldn’t he know better than anyone how enmeshed love and violence can be? Hadn’t Itachi taught him that lesson?
There’s something else, too. A possessive pull that he feels when he considers Sakura sleeping with another man. He thinks about her fucking the shinobi he met at her apartment, and Sasuke realizes he doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like it at all.
She smiles at him. “Do me a favor. Don’t say, ‘Thank you.’ Don’t say anything, okay?”
Sasuke should be relieved that he doesn’t have to respond, and he is. But an hour later, when he’s alone in his bed, unable to sleep, he understands that he is also disappointed. Because he isn’t sure, given the opportunity, how exactly he might have answered Sakura’s confession.

Hachiro waves at her from the top of the tree, and Sakura can’t help but smile.
“Good job!” she calls. “You’ve got it.”
He runs back down the trunk and then leaps to the ground, landing with the grace and precision his clan is famous for. “Thanks for helping me, Sakura-sensei,” he says.
“That’s what I’m here for.” She ruffles Hachiro’s long, dark hair and laughs when he ducks away.
“Tomorrow I’ll start teaching you and the others how to walk on water,” she says. “Let Saito and Izumi know to meet up here at six.”
“Six?” he asks, and it’s obvious that he doesn’t relish the idea of practicing at dawn.
Sakura shrugs. “It’s as early for me as it is for you. I have an afternoon shift at the hospital, though, so it’s then or never.”
Hachiro is a good kid, and he doesn’t gripe the way Saito and Izumi undoubtedly will. He just thanks her again and then sets off for home, a confident bounce in his step. He has so much untapped talent, and it just takes a little extra coaxing to bring it out of him. If he can learn not to second-guess himself so much, Sakura thinks he will make a strong shinobi, a credit to the Hyuuga and to Konoha. Perhaps she can be the one to help him reach his potential, the way Tsunade-shishou helped her.
Sakura practices her taijutsu, and as she moves through one kata into the next, she wonders where Tsunade is and how she’s doing. The Fifth Hokage left Konoha the day Naruto took office, and although Leaf ninja occasionally reported seeing her in various places throughout the Fire Country, she had yet to return to the village for a visit.
Sakura wonders, too, about Sasuke. If he’ll take his mission and Fujimoto Gorou as seriously as he should. If he’s thinking of her and what she admitted to him last night. Maybe she ought to regret her moment of boldness, but she doesn’t. It was the right thing to do, and she feels, if anything, relieved. Lighter and freer for having spoken the truth aloud. Sasuke can do what he will with the information--and most likely he’ll choose to do nothing--but Sakura didn’t say her piece for his benefit. She said it for herself.
By the time she finishes her forms it’s going on three o’clock. Sakura is sweaty and dirty, but she promised to have tea with her mother and now she’s too short on time to go back to her apartment and shower. She runs from the training grounds to the west side of town, to the place her parents moved into after Konoha’s reconstruction. It isn’t the house she grew up in--it isn’t home--but Sakura likes it well enough and she knows her way there.
Okaasan answers the door. “You’re late,” she says.
“Sorry.” She might offer an excuse, but her mother would see right through it anyway. Sakura takes off her shoes and sets them beside the door, careful to arrange them neatly.
Two cups of tea wait at the kitchen table. When she sips hers, Sakura finds that it’s no longer hot. She is wise enough not to mention this.
“So, how are you doing?” her mother asks.
“Busy. The hospital’s overflowing, as usual, and the genin are keeping me on my toes.”
“Well, I hope you’re getting enough rest. You look tired, sweetheart.”
Sakura sips her cooling tea, then says, “I’m fine. And I’m sleeping plenty.”
“I just worry about you. You’re so young to bear so much responsibility.”
Sakura has accepted that Okaasan will never truly treat her like an adult, but it doesn’t bother her the way it used to. She appreciates, now, that her mother’s overbearing tendencies are steeped in love and concern, not lack of belief in her daughter’s maturity.
“Where’s Otousan?” Sakura asks.
“On a mission to Takigakure. He’s going to be gone a week at least.” Okaasan frowns, and the lines bracketing her mouth deepen. “The fool is missing our twenty-sixth anniversary to escort some old dignitary.”
Sakura knows that it isn’t the anniversary that really bothers her mother. Okaasan misses her husband when he leaves the village for more than a few days, and she always finds some reason to complain about it. They’re very close, her mother and father, and very loving.
When she was younger, Sakura used to be embarrassed that her parents were only genin. Most shinobi their age were chunin at least. She knew, vaguely, that her father had failed the exam twice as a boy, and her mother, for some reason, had never taken it. It was a disadvantage to her own career that neither of her parents--who were themselves the children of civilians--had never become elite ninja, and for a time Sakura resented this. Now, though, she only feels thankful, because her parents’ ranks kept them out of the war, and it is not on low-level missions where shinobi usually lose their lives.
She thinks of Naruto’s parents and Sasuke’s clan. Ino’s father and Shikamaru’s father and Hyuuga Neji. Power carries a heavy price, and it is so often the strongest who die first.
But they live in a peaceful time now, and Sakura doesn’t have to worry about Otousan and Oksaasan ending up like the Fourth Hokage or Yamanaka Inoichi. With any luck, they will retire in a few years, a blessing so few ninja are granted.
“You look like you’re thinking too hard,” her mother says.
“Guilty,” Sakura admits.
“Anything I should know?”
She pretends to deliberate, then says, “Just that I love you, and I’m happy to be your daughter.”
“I love you too, sweetheart, and you know how proud I am of you,” says Okaasan. “Your cup is empty. Do you want more tea?”
Sakura smiles. “Yes, please. That would be wonderful.”

Infiltrating the outpost is easier than Sasuke expects. He uses a transformation jutsu to change his appearance, then allows himself to be caught by scouts. They take him straight to Fujimoto Gorou. The missing-nin is a tall man with narrow, pale eyes and long white hair pulled back in a braid. He smiles in a way that reminds Sasuke of Orochimaru.
“You were sneaking around my land,” Fujimoto says. “Why?”
Sasuke stands straighter. “I hear you hire fighting men, and I need work.”
“Is that so?” Fujimoto takes in his slight build and unassuming face. “You don’t look like much of a fighter.”
Sasuke elbows the man to his left in the neck, and he falls to the ground, choking. The two remaining scouts rush him. The first he knocks out with the hilt of his katana. He takes his time with the second, showing off his taijutsu, then wraps him in wire and dumps him at his boss’s feet.
Fujimoto laughs. “What’s your name, friend?”
“Kenta.”
“Well then, Kenta. Welcome.”
The next phase of the mission proves more difficult. Sasuke spends the following weeks earning Fujimoto’s recognition and what passes for his trust. The man is wary and intelligent and he asks sharp questions, but he’s more interested in Sasuke’s skill at arms than his background. He makes himself useful when Fujimoto requires a bodyguard, and at his side he gathers a wealth of information on the man’s allies and subordinates. Hamasaki Haru runs an underground prostitution ring out of the city Tosogawa. Akiyama Etsuko is an assassin who sells her sword to the highest bidder, and she’s recently been employed by Fujimoto to eliminate a former comrade. Inoue Hideyoshi, a defector of Amegakure, plans to break into his old village’s vaults and steal a scroll full of forbidden techniques. There are others--missing-nin, rogue samurai, plain criminals--and Sasuke takes note of their names, abilities, and whereabouts.
At night, if he isn’t busy performing some task or another for Fujimoto, he lies on his narrow cot, alone, and enjoys the lack of subterfuge. Sasuke’s transformation may be impeccable, but he has never been comfortable adopting a false skin. So in the few quiet moments granted to him here, he closes his eyes and remembers who he is. An Uchiha. A ninja of the Leaf. A brother. Darkness and solitude give him fleeting freedom from this mission, and he realizes that he misses home. Konoha with all its bustling activity. His own bed in his own house. Naruto’s relentless chatter. And Sakura, though he can’t afford to indulge thinking about her just now.
Killing Fujimoto will be the real challenge. The shinobi is cautious, and he keeps guards about his person and outside his chambers at all times. Sasuke could kill these men, but they are not his target and he would prefer to spare them.
Opportunity presents itself on the twenty-third day. Fujimoto leaves his outpost to meet with an associate on the Fire Country border. He chooses only three companions to accompany him: Haruki, Chinatsu, and Sasuke.

Sakura does not allow herself to worry about Sasuke. His mission is running long, yes, but the man is one of the strongest shinobi she knows. He can handle himself.
She pours a cup of tea in the break room. Hot, strong, no sugar or cream. It tastes of cinnamon, cardamom, and ginger, the spices of summer. Sakura sits, drinks, and tries not to measure minutes until her rounds start.
The door opens with a bang and Akiko rushes in. “Sakura-san,” she says. “You better come quick.”
She has not worried about Sasuke, so when Akiko leads her to a room where he lies, pale and barely conscious and covered in blood, she is, for just a moment, too surprised to move. Then her training kicks in and she pushes through the other medic-nin. Rough, rude, and not sorry for it. Sakura knows she is the best, and only the best will work on Sasuke-kun.
She looks at him and sees red. Sharingan awake in his right eye. Blood everywhere, splattered across his face and hands, soaking his clothes, far too much to be just his own. Raw panic rises inside her, threatens to break past the detached discipline Tsunade drilled into her years ago. She needs to focus. She needs to keep it together if she wants to save his life.
Sakura opens his torn shirt and finds a large laceration stretching diagonally across his chest and abdomen. It’s long and ugly but only moderately deep. Not life-threatening in itself, but he’s been on his feet since the fight, racing back to Konoha, and he’s lost too much blood. She wonders how he traveled so far--how he even made it across the village--in this condition.
Sakura gathers her chakra to her hands and begins working on the wound. Sealing skin back together, knitting muscle, reconnecting nerves. She can feel every dimension of the damage done to him, the trauma of it sings beneath her fingers, and if she wasn’t certain Sasuke had already killed Fujimoto, she would want to do so herself. She stops once the newly mended flesh shows only a pink line from collarbone to navel. Then she puts her hands over Sasuke’s wrists, over his pulse points, and the beating against her palms is weak. So faint for a man of such strength. Her chakra saturates his veins, forces the rapid reproduction of blood. New cells and platelets and plasma. Slowly, color comes back to his cheeks and she can sense his vitals evening out. Heart rate, respiration, oxygen level, and pressure returning to normal. When this is done, she moves to the mark on his chest and finishes repairing the skin. The scar dissipates beneath her touch. Fades into nothing, as if it were never there.
Sasuke’s eyes are closed now, the Sharingan and Rinnegan hidden.
“Clean him up,” Sakura says. “And I want a nurse to monitor him for the rest of the night.”
This, she knows, is an unnecessary precaution, but she will not gamble with Sasuke’s life.
Then Sakura walks to the locker room on trembling legs. She strips naked and steps into the shower. Twists the handle and stands beneath the stream of water that grows hot and hotter until the stall fills with suffocating steam. She leans against the cold tile wall, numb. Counts to ten, twenty, one hundred, ticking off numbers in her head so she doesn’t have to think about other things. Feeling gradually returns to her limbs, and Sakura washes herself. Scrubs with harsh hospital soap until her skin is tender and pink. Then she turns off the water and dries her body with a scratchy, no-nonsense towel. Fishes a fresh uniform out of her locker and dresses.
She tells herself this is just another work day. She tells herself such a lie so that she can move one foot in front of the other. So she does not go to Sasuke’s room and sit by his bedside until he opens his eyes.
Sakura looks at her clean hands, which seem suddenly foreign, as if they belong to someone else. Some other medic who just watched the man she loves almost die.
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In Times of Peace